


like a shaken fist

by threadoflife



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Season/Series 03, all the happy ends!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 11:18:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7889527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threadoflife/pseuds/threadoflife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was only in your dreams that you could do this: sharpen his eyes, define the undefined. See what you (want to) see. Waking, though, your heart was a shaken fist, not even your own, but Sherlock's, whether he wanted it or not. He held it there, tightly, suffocatingly, like it was dangerous for him and not you. -- Sherlock and John, always looking (past).</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a shaken fist

**Author's Note:**

> This came to me in a whirlwind and I've been writing this for the past 2 hours because I couldn't sleep and this is not beta-read (I don't have a beta-reader), so all mistakes are mine. I want to share it before I decide I'd better not. Here you go.

It's only in your dreams you can do this.  
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,  
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;  
the sun's a hot copper weight pressing straight  
down on the thick pink rind of your skull.  
It's always the moment just before the gunshot.  
You try & try to rise but you cannot.

Margaret Atwood: _Flying Inside Your Own Body_

 

 

These days, Sherlock says things like, “I swear I will always be there,” and, “I heard you,” and you breathe through them, your airflow smooth and steady. Sherlock says things like, “John Watson, the kindest and wisest human being,” and though it sounds so dangerously similar to what you say to him in the empty train carriage just After, your heart keeps beating without interruption. These days, Sherlock says these things, and your body remains unaffected.

When Sherlock says, “There’s something I should say, I’ve meant to say always, and then never have,” though, it doesn’t—because. Despite everything, your stupid breath hitches, and your stupid heart trips, and your stupid fingers twitch. _Because._

Because when Sherlock says that, he looks at you, and you look at him. You return his look, and when he doesn’t say what he said he would, your mouth contorts itself into a smile that makes a sound, several sounds—acknowledging; relieved; startled; resigned; hopeless? When Sherlock says that, you return his look; and when he doesn’t say what he said he would, you turn away, and you don’t look at him anymore.

You can’t look at him anymore.

*

Before Sherlock went away, you were a fool: every time you looked at him, you felt you were saying everything you never would be able to say, nonverbally. You said it with your face. Harry once told you it was good you couldn’t see yourself in some situations, because your face was horribly telling. Something about the tendons in your throat, or your eyebrows. You caught yourself with the latter, once, when you’d been in the middle of staring at Sherlock. Harry had been right: sometimes, it all showed dangerously on your face, like an open book. 

Fortunately for you, the book with the title _Human Emotions_ is the only one Sherlock can’t read.

You tried to reign that in, and you aren't sure you always managed. There were still times when it must have shown horribly on your face, like an open wound nobody could do anything against—you certainly felt like you were bleeding out sometimes, and no amount of gauze or stitches could salvage you—but you still tried, regardless, because that was what you did. You were a soldier. You won a war, you lost a war, whatever it was you did, you pushed on. Shouldered your pack, patched up comrades, kept walking. There was no time to stop, there never was, and most certainly not with Sherlock. You were always on the move with him, always had to be flexible and bending and shifting. You liked that. There was the danger on the cases, of course, but the danger that thrilled and terrified you most of all was in the moments between, like at night when he banged the door to the bathroom open—the one from his bedroom—when you were brushing your teeth.

You remember that: he’d been sleeping before you for once, surprisingly, and his hair was tousled—so messy your fingers itched to run through it—and his eyes were puffy from sleep, and you were watching him for no reason in the mirror of the hanging cabinet. The next thing you knew was you were brushing your teeth to the sound of him pissing, and none of you said a word about that, and you never said a word about watching him. You had no idea if Sherlock knew you were doing it, or if he didn’t, but neither of you ever verbalised it. You failed to verbalise many things.

But whether Sherlock knew or not, you stopped looking anyway, quickly, once he zipped up and flushed, and then bent over the sink, and his awfully bony elbow poked into the side of your ribs because he demanded you make space without asking nicely, and you didn’t give him that space. For his rudeness of course; you had no other motivation. 

The danger there was that very domestic moment that you shared so thoughtlessly and self-evidently, him splashing water into his face while you were brushing your teeth—it was you thinking, as you frequently did during such encounters, _God, I could spend the rest of my life just like this even without the cases,_ and once you realised you’d thought that, you cringed inwardly and immediately assumed a mental parade rest that manifested itself in a total closing off of your face. Because in those moments, the internal danger became external, became the softening of your eyes, the curling of your lips, the relaxing of your entire body.

The danger was in those domestic moments, and the danger was in you looking, because he might just catch you and learn the emotional vocabulary quickly enough to decode your looks, and if that happened—well, you decided you’d be screwed then, of course.

As long as you were looking and it didn’t matter, that was fine; there was still something like plausible deniability. If Sherlock knew what that meant, though, if he knew it, he’d be forced to react: would he look back? Would he dismiss it? What would he do? 

He did look sometimes, of course. But it never meant _that_ , because it couldn’t mean that. He’d also looked at Irene Adler, and he’d been stone-cold towards her at the end. (Had he?) (He’d taken her phone.) But, yes, Sherlock did look at you sometimes, in some ways, but you were always careful to leave these ways undefined. 

(It was only in your dreams that you did this: sharpen his eyes, define the undefined. See what you (wanted to) see. Waking, though, your heart was a shaken fist, not even your own, but Sherlock's, whether he wanted it or not. He held it there, tightly, suffocatingly, like it was dangerous for him and not you.)

But of course it wasn’t what you thought, or wanted, or the like. This was Sherlock Holmes: of course it wasn’t what you thought or wanted, because stupid as you were you wanted his looks to be the same as yours, and they never could be. He was a sociopath. He’d incinerate you, if you got it wrong.

It would kill you, you thought. It was better to live thinking he couldn’t feel things that way than to know he could feel them, just not for you, specifically you. 

It was a horrible thought, but there it was: you’d rather Sherlock didn’t look. Look back at you, or look at anyone else (in general) for that matter. So you decided he didn’t look. There was enough danger lurking in the everyday with him that you needed to have your wits about you at all times.

Anyway, if he didn’t look, _you_ were safe to look. So when he didn’t, you kept doing that.

You kept looking at Sherlock.

Because that’s what you were, right? That's what you did?

He said danger, and there you were.

*

This was the past, and this is now. You spent two years looking for him—and at him, too, though he was never really there, obviously, just inside your head—and then he just comes back, just like that, and you resume your partnership, but with significant changes ahead. 

You gave him your heart once, in your looks. You know you did. You gave it to him, in that damned bathroom when he had his back to you; after those fifty-seven fucking texts over a glass of alcohol and “How are we feeling about that?”; over the distance of a parking lot up to a roof; over Chinese and Indian and so many other take-aways, countless dinners, so many moments, in all of which you gave your heart to him, in your looks, because you were a bloody fool—a _literal_ bloody fool, because Sherlock paid you back in his own blood by jumping, and you never wanted that, Christ, you never wanted anything but just to be allowed to stay by his side because that was the best life you’d ever known and you’d been satisfied with that always, but nothing had been as you’d thought, and those looks had never meant anything—as you’d known, just as you’d known. Of course.

This was the past, and this is now, and now you are still busy picking up the pieces you shattered into, and you’re afraid you’ll never make it back into the whole. And that hurts, is worse than fucking Afghanistan, because Afghanistan was living by existing and Sherlock was living by living; so Sherlock did that, and then he came back, and that's when you decide you need new armour. This can't happen again. If it happened again, there’d be no glue left in all the world to put your heart back together again.

So you resume your old partnership, with significant changes: you will not look at him anymore.

It’s only one rule, but it’s the most important one of all. 

You can’t do this again. Not another time.

*

Only fate likes to seriously screw with you—honestly, did you piss on God’s food or something, in a previous life?—because these days, it is Sherlock who looks at you, and isn’t that ironic? Either you’re really going around the bend this time or something must have happened: Sherlock, you (are afraid to) think (but do it anyway), looks at you like you looked at him. 

But you’re married now.

And you’re expecting a child.

And you’ve thought that once before, that he might have looked at you like this, or at least not minded you looking at him like this, but it wasn’t true, so you can’t go there again. 

So when Sherlock looks at you, your mental parade rest is back and you bully your body into remaining non-responsive. It’s difficult, but it works. Denial and repression are—for better or worse—some of your strongest suits. So when Sherlock says, “I swear I will always be there,” and, “I heard you,” you breathe through them, your airflow smooth and steady. When Sherlock says things like, “John Watson, the kindest and wisest human being,” though it sounds so dangerously similar to what you say to him in the empty carriage just After, your heart keeps beating without interruption. Your eyes tear up, yes, but then, they’ve always been traitors; and it’s just once. On your wedding day, too, so you put it on that bill. You’re allowed some emotional leeway on that day, if on no other. 

The point is, most other days that Sherlock says these things and sometimes looks at you, your body remains unaffected.

But even your resolve has an Achilles heel. Create a perfectly working system, put a virus on it; create a rule, put an exception to its side; have John, put Sherlock beside him. 

The perfectly working system: your body, healthy enough to keep you alive on its own. The virus: lacking the software of emotional fulfilment that is opened only with the key code ‘Sherlock.’ 

Your breaking point is after a mountain of lies and treachery and frankly so much nonsense you have no idea what is happening anymore; your breaking point is after almost losing Sherlock again, this time for real, watching his heart stop, seeing the doctors almost give up on him—and then have Sherlock say to you, on an odd day when he’s leaving for six months: “There’s something I should say, I’ve meant to say always, and then never have…” 

Your body reacts—because. Despite everything, your stupid breath hitches, and your stupid heart trips, and your stupid fingers twitch. _Because._

Because when Sherlock says that, he looks at you, and you look at him. You return his look for once, and you’re waiting for him to continue, you’re waiting for him to apply the vocabulary he seems to finally have learned—you look back at him and you will him into saying it because there can’t be anything else, not after everything—and you suddenly _hope_ , fiercely, you hope against your better knowing, and it _hurts_ —and when he doesn’t say what he said he would, your mouth contorts itself into a smile that makes a sound, several sounds—acknowledging; relieved; startled; resigned; hopeless? 

When Sherlock says that, you return his look; and when he doesn’t say what he said he would, you turn away, and you don’t look at him anymore.

You can’t look at him anymore.

You just breathe. You breathe in all the silence between you.

*

It is only later, much later, that you realise you are still a fool even after Sherlock is back: because Sherlock is not the only one who does not know all the vocabulary in the world. You’ve forgotten some chapters of _Human Emotions_. You’ve read them now, in painful, slow going, with much effort, in the months after everything happened, after your life turned out like a regular soap opera with Mary disappearing and the child not being yours. (The first thing you'd thought of then, stupidly, were the turn-ups of Mary's jeans; the next thought was not forthcoming because you couldn't breathe anymore.) You’ve come across _Kindness_ , and when you read that, you remember the silence at the tarmac, and then you cry to yourself in your bed in the new, lonely flat you have that you don’t share with Sherlock. You cry for all the lost years, and the things that could have been, out of rage for your own blindness, and when you’ve finished crying, you feel boneless and relieved and tired.

This is how you appear at the doorstep of 221B in the next hour: puffy eyes, tousled hair, much like Sherlock just after waking up, and this is how you look up at Sherlock when he opens the door to your much too polite knocking at 3.20 in the night. This is how you look up at him, and this is how you allow him to see you, because you’re tired, you are so tired. You’ve been running from this all your life, and you’ve always been brave in the face of danger, but not this, never this—because you might hurl yourself into half-suicidal mad schemes of action, but you guard your heart. You guard your heart because it has always been so awfully fucking small.

You’re a doctor, and you can stitch organs back together and hope for the best; but the heart? What are you going to do with an ache that infects the heart like cancer but is intangible, not material, not curable at all? What are you good against such, as a doctor, as a soldier? Nobody ever told you how to handle these things, so you handled them in your own way. 

Silently, and not at all. 

And you look up at Sherlock like this, with this truth written bare on your face, ugly and stark; and you think about how Sherlock knew this, all along, how he’s accepted this part of you just like you’ve accepted every part he ever falsely presented out of self-preservation to you; and you wonder at the impossibility of this man, because he looks at you now, quick, furtive movements of his eyes all over your face and down your body and your hands; his one is eyebrow arched in disbelief, the other in pain; his lips part; and you wonder at his impossibility, because he’s always found ugly things beautiful.

Ultimately he stares down at your hands and reaches towards you. His fingertips touch your left cheek, barely—softly—like a bird’s feather on your skin, almost not there at all but still there, because this is real and this is now and this is not the past. He touches you, as if in enquiry, as if in hope, as if in anything, and before you know it you’ve covered that hand with yours and press it hard into your cheek, harder, until his fingernails dig into your skin from the pressure you apply. You keep the pressure up until his parted lips begin trembling and his nostrils flaring and his fingers dig their nails on their own into your cheek until it hurts.

Only then do you let go, and only then do you say, while your hands fist themselves without your volition in his faded t-shirt as if you could keep him with you by sheer force, “I’m there, if you want it.”

You say it to his bowed head, but that doesn’t matter. It’s as quiet as his first touch, but that doesn’t matter either. You said it.

You look at Sherlock, and finally Sherlock looks at you. After so many months, so many years, you finally look at one another, full frontal, eyes on eyes. The second your gazes lock, Sherlock’s face just crumbles, just falls, collapses into itself like all his facial muscles have given in, like your eyes have so much power over him. Like the night of the wedding when you’d looked away because you hadn’t been able to face it. You can face it now, and you do; he’s facing you too, after all.

Sherlock makes a noise in his throat that is unintelligible. It could have been words, could have been a cough, but it doesn’t matter. Words don’t matter anymore, now. This is what _Kindness_ told you: that silence is the loudest sometimes; that the presence of something’s absence echoes more than the actual absence itself. 

There are no more words that need to be said.

You’ve already said them all.

You’re saying them now.

Sherlock's eyes are wide open, and clear.

There is a light opening up within you.

There is a fist that loosens. That holds, that cradles.

Safely.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] like a shaken fist](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8119021) by [nutmeag83](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nutmeag83/pseuds/nutmeag83)




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